Up and Down Wall Street

A Fevered Finale

Investors end the year's first six months in a sweat, worried about the Fed's intentions.

From Tepper to taper. That pretty much sums up the quarter just ended.

For about the first two-thirds of the period, the overwhelmingly bullish outlook laid out by David Tepper, the president of Appaloosa Management, carried the stock market to historic highs. In a widely noted mid-May appearance on CNBC, the billionaire hedge-fund manager contended that things were going so great that, if the Federal Reserve didn't taper its...